Monday, November 24, 2014

Continuing the good news at Harvard, word has been given that Eddie Kohler has officially been offered tenure. So we hope/expect/are excited about keeping Eddie here for decades to come.

Eddie's contributions to computer science are well known -- he recently won the SIGOPS Mark Weiser award -- but perhaps less well known and appreciated are his contributions here at Harvard. I can't imagine how we were surviving before he got here; he enriches the place constantly through teaching, tools, insights, questions, and countless other ways. It's great news for us here at Harvard.

Monday, November 10, 2014

Veterans Day is a federal holiday, but, at Harvard classes go on. This year, the holiday is observed for staff, but we'll be teaching.

I can't easily find out when the practice of having classes on Veterans Day became standard. I found this Crimson article from 2004, but it makes it sound like holding classes (it seems to just mention sections, not actual lectures) was not official policy. I also am not sure when this dichotomy of the day being a staff holiday, but classes are held, started. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I haven't noticed this scheduling issue until this year, so perhaps the changes are new.

I understand that, from a teaching and scheduling standpoint, it's a bit annoying with the holidays messing up the teaching schedule. It's also annoying when your children are out of school for the day for a federal holiday while you have to teach. Also, it seems a bit odd, if not somewhat unpatriotic, "cancelling" Veterans Day for the students (and faculty), although I know that most people generally do not engage in veteran-specific activities for the holiday. (That's true of our family, and my wife is a veteran.)

I suppose I might not really have thought too much about it, except that somehow I noticed that Columbus Day is a university holiday at Harvard, and, because I'm sure most readers do not get enough John Oliver in their diet, here what his show has to say about that.

Saturday, November 01, 2014

Ebola #1 (local): The HackEbola with Data website gives detail for the upcoming Harvard Hacking event in conjunction with Statistics without Borders. If doing some data mining for a cause is your thing, please check it out. (No, you don't have to be associated with Harvard to participate...)

Ranking again (no, not again!): This one is tells the story of King Abdulaziz University and the US News and World Report Rankings. (I note, as follow up from a few years ago, that I remain disturbed that nobody is offering to pay me large sums just to have me affiliated with them for the purposes of raising their citation count.)